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Although children's reticence to intervene as bystanders to bullying is well established, the reasons for their inaction remain unclear. One possibility is that they are incapable of generating appropriate response strategies in these situations. This study examined the number and type of strategies children (N = 104, 6–11 years) could generate for bystanders to a variety of bullying situations. Across bullying situations, older children generated more strategies than did younger children. Children most often suggested that the bystander confront the bully directly, followed by the suggestion that the bystander find a teacher for help or comfort the victim. An exclusion incident prompted more frequent proposals that the bystander help by comforting the victim while a pushing incident prompted more frequent appeals to a teacher. A priming story about a peer bystander intervening successfully in a bullying incident boosted strategy production in girls but did not affect boys.

A growing literature argues that wearing a heavy backpack makes slopes look steeper and distances seem longer (e.g., Proffitt, 2006). To test for effects of experimental demand characteristics in a backpack experiment, we manipulated the experimental demand of the backpack and then used a postexperiment questionnaire to assess participants' beliefs about the purpose of the backpack. For participants in the low-demand condition, an elaborate deception was used to provide an alternative explanation of the requirement to wear a heavy backpack (i.e., that it held EMG equipment). The highest slope judgments were found for those undeceived participants who guessed that the backpack was intended to affect their slope perception and also reported that they thought they were affected by it. When persuaded that the backpack served another purpose, participants' slope estimates were no different from those of participants not wearing a backpack. These findings suggest that backpack effects, and other reported effects of effort on perception, are judgmental biases that result from the social, not physical, demands of the experimental context.

Using naturalistic stimuli, we assessed the ability to infer what other people are feeling in three groups of participants: healthy elderly adults, patients suffering from the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (FTD-b), and patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease (AD). After watching videotaped interviews of everyday people (nonactors) discussing an emotionally relevant event in their lives, participants answered questions regarding the interviewee's feelings. Both patient groups inferred emotions as accurately as the healthy elderly, provided the emotions were displayed unambiguously and consistently across the interview. However, when the displayed emotions became more variable and ambiguous, performance in both patient groups became impaired relative to healthy elderly participants. The similar profile across the two clinical groups despite their differences in social skills suggests that nonsocial cognitive processes affected in dementia may be an important factor in drawing inferences about other people's feelings.

Children's observation of the given-new contract was tested with a task requiring children to provide novel, rather than known, information about an event to a listener. Study 1 revealed developmental differences in children's adherence to the contract: 4- and 5-year-olds showed better adherence to the contract than 3-year-olds. In Studies 2 and 3, language competence and the ability to track others' experiences emerged as significant independent predictors of children's adherence to the given-new contract. Together, the findings suggest that adherence to the given-new contract is a complex skill related to several foundational abilities that undergo significant development during the preschool period.

The authors explore children's use of intention information in evaluating the moral quality of others' actions. They also address links among mental state understanding, motives-based moral reasoning, and children's own moral behavior.

Four studies investigated whether 4- and 5-year-olds recognize the potential for diversity in the intentions that motivate a given action. Children heard stories in which 2 characters performed the same action (e.g., running) yet had different desires (e.g., to be home for dinner vs. to be healthy and strong). Children were asked to determine what each character was trying to do (e.g., get somewhere fast vs. get some exercise). Five-year-olds successfully assigned different intentions to the characters, despite the fact that their actions were identical. Four-year-olds, in contrast, tended to attribute the same intention to characters performing the same action, even though their desires clearly differed. Children of this age were, nevertheless, capable of attributing different intentions to characters performing different actions (Study 2). Four-year-olds' difficulty differentiating two intentions for a given action persisted despite several task simplifications (Studies 3 and 4), suggesting that childre...

When we observe others in motion, we usually care little about the surface behaviors they exhibit. What matters are their underlying intentions. Judgments about intentions and intentionality dictate how we understand and remember others' actions, how we respond, and what we predict about their future action. A generative knowledge system underlies our skill at discerning intentions, enabling us to comprehend intentions even when action is novel and unfolds in complex ways over time. Recent work spanning many disciplines illuminates some of the processes involved in intention detection. We review these developments and articulate a set of questions cutting across current theoretical dividing lines.

Kentridge and Heywood (this issue) extend the concept of metacognition to include unconscious processes. We acknowledge the possible contribution of unconscious processes, but favor a central role of awareness in metacognition. We welcome Shimamura's (this issue) extension of the concept of metacognitive regulation to include aspects of working memory, and its relation to executive attention. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.

The ability to understand other people's behavior in terms of mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions, is central to social interaction. It has been argued that the interpersonal problems of patients with behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (FTD-b) are due to a dysfunction of that system. We used first- and second-order false-belief tasks to assess theory-of-mind reasoning in a group of patients with FTD-b and a cognitively matched group of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Both patient groups were equally impaired relative to a healthy elderly group in the cognitively demanding second-order false-belief tasks, revealing that cognitive demands are an important factor in false-belief task performance. Both patient groups reached ceiling performance in the first-order false-belief tasks with minimal cognitive demands, despite the striking difference in their social graces. These results suggest that a conceptual deficit in theory of mind-as measured by the false-belief task-is not at the core of the differences between FTD-b and AD.

1. Introduction: Why Language Matters 2. Language pathways into the community of minds 3. Communication, relationships, and individual differences in children's understanding of mind 4. Conversation, pretence and theory of mind 5. Talking about "new" information: the given/new distinction and children's developing theory of mind 6. The developmental origins of meaning for mental terms 7. Language promotes structural alignment in the acquisition of mentalistic concepts 8. Language and the development of cognitive flexibility: Implications for theory of mind 9. Representational development and false-belief understanding 10. Can language acquisition give children a point of view? 11. What does "that" have to do with point of view? Conflicting desires and "want" in German 12. Linguistic communication and social understanding 13. The role of language in theory-of-mind development: What deaf children tell us 14. How language facilitates the acquisition of false-belief understanding in children with autism 15. Genetic and environmental influences on individual differences in language and theory of mind: Common or distinct?

As observers of human behavior, infants are faced with a complex flow of motion in which pauses are rare and only occasionally coincide with boundaries between intentional actions. Two studies investigated whether, despite such complexity, 10- to 11-month-old infants (N = 16 for each study) possess skills for parsing ongoing behavior along boundaries correlated with the initiation and completion of intentions. After being familiarized with digitized sequences of continuous everyday action, infants showed renewed interest in test versions in which motion paused in the midst of an actor's pursuit of intentions (interrupting test videos). In contrast, pauses that suspended motion at intention boundary points (completing test videos) sparked no such renewed interest on infants' part. Moreover, basic salience differences between the two types of test videos were not the source of infants' increased interest when intentions were interrupted (Study 2). These findings demonstrate that infants readily detect disruptions of the structure inherent in intentional action, and hence parse ongoing behavior with respect to such structure. Such parsing skill is likely a prerequisite to the development of genuine intentional understanding.

Metacognition refers to any knowledge or cognitive process that monitors or controls cognition. We highlight similarities between metacognitive and executive control functions, and ask how these processes might be implemented in the human brain. A review of brain imaging studies reveals a circuitry of attentional networks involved in these control processes, with its source located in midfrontal areas. These areas are active during conflict resolution, error correction, and emotional regulation. A developmental approach to the organization of the anatomy involved in executive control provides an added perspective on how these mechanisms are influenced by maturation and learning, and how they relate to metacognitive activity.